Main menu

Robert Gates Double-Crosses Obama

January 8, 2014

Special Report: Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates is slamming President Obama in a new memoir, accusing him of lacking enthusiasm for the Afghan War. But perhaps Obama’s bigger mistake was trusting Gates, a Bush Family operative with a history of dirty dealing, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

As Barack Obama is staggered by a back-stabbing memoir from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the President can’t say that some people didn’t warn him about the risk of bringing a political opportunist like Gates into his inner circle on national security.

Those warnings date back to just days after Obama’s election in 2008 when word began to spread that some of his advisers were urging Obama to keep Gates on as Defense Secretary as part of a “Team of Rivals” and a show of bipartisanship. On Nov. 13, 2008, I posted a story at Consortiumnews.com entitled “The Danger of Keeping Robert Gates,” which said:

Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Situation Room on May 1, 2011, monitoring the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. (From White House photo by Pete Souza)

“If Obama does keep Gates on, the new President will be employing someone who embodies many of the worst elements of U.S. national security policy over the past three decades, including responsibility for what Obama himself has fingered as a chief concern, ‘politicized intelligence.’ it was Gates as a senior CIA official in the 1980s who broke the back of the CIA analytical division’s commitment to objective intelligence.”

But Gates’s nefarious roles in national security scandals went much deeper than that, despite his undeniable PR skills in shaping his image as a dedicated public servant who has earned Official Washington’s near-universal regard as a modern-day Wise Man.

In reality, Gates has been more a careerist who had a chameleon-like skill to adapt to the ideological hues of the powerful people around him. But at his core he seemed most comfortable in a Cold War setting of tough-talking belligerence which led him to repeated policy miscalculations, including dismissing Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 as a phony and missing the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.

But it’s how Gates began his meteoric rise in the U.S. intelligence community during the Reagan years that has remained most cloaked in mystery. As a young CIA official in 1980, Gates was implicated in secret maneuvers to sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a failure by Carter that doomed his reelection.

Gates was identified as one of the participants in a key October 1980 meeting in Paris allegedly also involving William Casey, who was then Reagan’s campaign director; George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director and then-Reagan’s vice presidential running mate; Iranian emissary Mehdi Karrubi; and Israeli intelligence officers, including Ari Ben-Menashe who later testified under oath about what he witnessed.

The Paris meeting and Gates’s alleged involvement was also cited by a Russian government report given to U.S. congressional investigators in early 1993. The Russian Report prepared by a national security committee of the Russian Duma stated that “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership in Madrid and Paris.”

At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part,” the Russian Report said. “In Madrid and Paris, the representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.”

According to the Russian Report, the Republicans succeeded in wooing the Iranians who rebuffed Carter’s appeals. “After the victory of R. Reagan in the election, in early 1981, a secret agreement was reached in London in accord with which Iran released the American hostages, and the U.S. continued to supply arms, spares and military supplies for the Iranian army,” the Russian Report said.

The Iranians only released the hostages after Reagan was sworn in as President on Jan. 20, 1981. U.S.-approved arms deliveries followed, carried out by Israel, the Russian Report said. As a young Israeli intelligence officer, Ben-Menashe testified that he took part in the weapons shipments, sometimes coordinating his work with Gates at the CIA. Gates has denied the allegations but he has been less than forthcoming with investigators.

The Russian Report came in response to an Oct. 21, 1992, query from Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, who was then heading a task force examining this so-called October Surprise case. But Hamilton later told me that the Russian Report never reached him, ending up in a box of unpublished files that I discovered a couple of years later. [For the text of the Russian report, click here. To view the U.S. embassy cable that contains the Russian report, click here.]

Hamilton’s investigation also faced frustrations when it tried to secure information about the 1980 whereabouts of Gates and Donald Gregg, another CIA officer linked to the October Surprise allegations. Documents released by the National Archives have revealed that the CIA in 1991 and 1992 dragged its heels on complying with Hamilton’s information requests on Gates and Gregg, both of whom were close to then-President George H.W. Bush.

As Hamilton’s investigation was starting in fall 1991, President Bush went to extraordinary lengths to install Gates as CIA director, facing down stiff congressional resistance because of suspicions that Gates had lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, which also involved secret Reagan-approved arms shipment to Iran.

So it was Gates’s agency in 1991-92 that stonewalled the congressional investigators seeking information on Gates’s possible collaboration with enemies of the United States in 1980. [For more details on this October Surprise mystery, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege and America’s Stolen Narrative. For Hamilton’s latest assessment of the case, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Second Thoughts on October Surprise.”]

Evading Accountability

In the end, Gates was able to skate away from the October Surprise suspicions just as he had evaded concerns about his role in other CIA-related scandals. Gates had been implicated, too, in misleading Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal and Iraq-gate, a parallel program of secretly aiding Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Though Gates also denied any wrongdoing in those scandals and disparaged Ben-Menashe and another witness who linked him to the Iraqi arms deals the allegations about Gates and Iraq were bolstered by a January 1995 affidavit from Howard Teicher, who had been a staffer on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council.

So, it appears that Robert Gates made his bones in George H.W. Bush’s covert world by undertaking secretive projects that skirted American law, such as evading arms export controls against shipments to Iran and Iraq, and even may have engaged in actions bordering on treason if the October Surprise allegations are true.

If Gates did indeed perform these sensitive missions, his swift rise in the early 1980s from a relatively obscure analyst to chief of the analytical division and then to deputy CIA director would make more sense. As he climbed the bureaucratic ladder, he further enhanced his standing with the Reagan administration by whipping the CIA analysts into line behind President Reagan’s apocalyptic view of the Soviet Union.

Corrupting Intelligence

Before Gates’s ascent in the 1980s, the CIA’s analytical division had a proud tradition of objectivity and scholarship regarding the agency’s intelligence product. However, during the Reagan administration with Gates playing a key role, that ethos collapsed.

At Gates’s confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA analysts, including senior Soviet specialist Melvin Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing the intelligence while he was chief of the analytical division and then deputy director.

These former intelligence officers said the ambitious Gates pressured the CIA’s analytical division to hype the Soviet menace to fit Reagan’s ideological perspective. Analysts who took a more nuanced view of Soviet power and behavior faced pressure and career reprisals.

In 1981, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl of the CIA’s Soviet office was the unfortunate analyst who was handed the assignment to prepare an analysis on the Soviet Union’s alleged support and direction of international terrorism. Contrary to the desired White House take on Soviet-backed terrorism, Ekedahl said the consensus of the intelligence community was that the Soviets discouraged acts of terrorism by groups getting support from Moscow for practical, not moral, reasons.

“We agreed that the Soviets consistently stated, publicly and privately, that they considered international terrorist activities counterproductive and advised groups they supported not to use such tactics,” Ekedahl testified. “We had hard evidence to support this conclusion.”

But Gates took the analysts to task, accusing them of trying to “stick our finger in the policy maker’s eye,” Ekedahl said. Gates, dissatisfied with the terrorism assessment, joined in rewriting the draft “to suggest greater Soviet support for terrorism and the text was altered by pulling up from the annex reports that overstated Soviet involvement,” Ekedahl said.

Soon, the hammer fell on the analysts who had prepared the more nuanced Soviet-terrorism report. Ekedahl said many analysts were “replaced by people new to the subject who insisted on language emphasizing Soviet control of international terrorist activities.”

A donnybrook ensued inside the U.S. intelligence community. Some senior officials responsible for analysis pushed back against the dictates of Gates and CIA Director Casey, warning that acts of politicization would undermine the integrity of the process and risk policy disasters in the future.

In his first memoir, From the Shadows, Gates denied politicizing the CIA’s intelligence product, though acknowledging that he was aware of Casey’s hostile reaction to the analysts’ disagreement with right-wing theories about Soviet-directed terrorism.

But the evidence is clear that Gates used top-down management techniques to get his way. CIA analysts sensitive to their career paths intuitively grasped that they could rarely go wrong by backing the “company line” and presenting the worst-case scenario about Soviet capabilities and intentions, Ekedahl and other CIA analysts said.

The CIA’s proud Soviet analytical office underwent a purge of its top people. “Nearly every senior analyst on Soviet foreign policy eventually left the Office of Soviet Analysis,” Goodman said. “The politicization that took place during the Casey-Gates era is directly responsible for the CIA’s loss of its ethical compass and the erosion of its credibility.

“The fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself is due in large measure to the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate.”

The Afghan Folly

But Gates’s legacy at the CIA had other even more lethal consequences. Because of his insistence on overstating Soviet strength, Gates misread the opportunity presented by the emergence of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s. From Gates’s perch near the top of the U.S. national security establishment, he kept calling Gorbachev a phony who would never withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

When Gorbachev did withdraw Soviet troops in February 1989, Gates then serving as President George H.W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser joined in the decision to rebuff Gorbachev’s proposal for a cease-fire and a coalition government between the Soviet-backed regime of President Najibullah in Kabul and the CIA-supported mujahedeen. Instead, Gates and his colleagues set their sights on a decisive victory for the CIA- and Saudi-backed forces, which included Osama bin Laden and other Islamist extremists.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom of Official Washington that America’s “big mistake” in Afghanistan was to abandon the mujahedeen after the Soviets left in early 1989 a myth pushed by Gates himself the reality was that the Bush-41 administration continued funneling money and weapons to the rebels for nearly three more years as the fractious mujahedeen failed to take Kabul but busied themselves slaughtering civilians and each other.

Najibullah’s regime actually outlasted the Soviet Union, which fell apart in late 1991. Ironically, after failing to detect cracks in the Soviet empire dating back at least to the 1970s, Gates and his cohorts claimed credit for its “sudden” collapse. But the chaos in Afghanistan, which might have been avoided if Gates had cooperated with Gorbachev, soon set the stage for new national security threats to the United States.

By fall 1991, President George H.W. Bush had reinstalled Gates at the CIA as director all the better to frustrate investigations into October Surprise, Iran-Contra and Iraq-gate.

After Bush’s defeat in 1992, Gates had hoped to stay on, but was removed by President Bill Clinton. Gates retreated to Washington State, where he worked on his first memoir, From the Shadows. Afterwards, ex-President Bush arranged to get Gates a job at Texas A&M, where Gates, the ever-skillful bureaucrat, soon rose to become the school’s president.

Meanwhile, in the mid-1990s, the fundamentalist Taliban emerged from Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and successfully marched on Kabul. One of the Taliban’s first victims was Najibullah who was tortured, castrated and hung from a light post. Thankful for the help from Saudi-backed jihadists, the Taliban also granted refuge to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda band which had shifted its terror war from the Soviets to the Americans.

After George W. Bush’s disputed election victory in 2000, many of Gates’s neocon allies returned to power in Washington and after al-Qaeda carried out the 9/11 attacks U.S. forces were dispatched to Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and root out al-Qaeda, whose surviving leaders mostly fled to Pakistan.

Rather than fully stabilize Afghanistan, Bush-43 and the neocons quickly pivoted toward Iraq with an invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein. Soon, U.S. forces found themselves bogged down in two inconclusive wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. By 2006, Iraq was descending into a sectarian civil war and Bush faced the prospect of a humiliating military defeat. He and his neocon advisers began thinking about a U.S. military escalation, to be called a “surge.”

But Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, the Iraq field commanders, felt they had already begun tamping down the violence through a mix of alliances with Sunni tribes, reducing the American “footprint,” separating Shiite and Sunni communities, and targeted killings of al-Qaeda militants. Abizaid and Casey were supported in their strategy by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

So, as President Bush settled on the “surge” a plan to dispatch 30,000 more soldiers he also decided to replace his military command, recalling Abizaid and Casey and cashiering Rumsfeld. Bush turned to Gen. David Petraeus to implement the “surge” and recruited Gates to sell it as the new Defense Secretary.

The Democrats and the Washington press corps were easily fooled. They misinterpreted the personnel changes as a sign that Bush had decided to wind down the war. Gates was hailed as an “adult” who would lead the impetuous “war president” out of the Iraq quagmire. But the reality was the opposite. Gates became Bush’s guide for going in deeper.

Gates also proved invaluable in selling the “surge” as a great “success,” although nearly 1,000 additional U.S. soldiers died (along with countless Iraqis) and the strategic arc toward a U.S. defeat wasn’t changed. The primary “success” from the “surge” was to enable Bush and his neocon advisers to exit the scene without a clear-cut defeat wrapped around their necks.

The Gates Legend

But the legend of Robert Gates and the myth of the “successful surge” shielded him from the damaged reputations that the bloody debacle in Iraq inflicted on Bush and many neocons.

After Obama was elected in 2008, his advisers persuaded the President-elect to keep Gates on as Defense Secretary, along with the media’s beloved Gen. Petraeus as a top commander. Obama ignored contrary advice from former CIA analysts who had worked with Gates and from the few journalists who understood Gates’s real history.

Obama’s decision to go with the “Team of Rivals” theme in assembling his national security team guaranteed that he surrounded himself with people like Gates who had no loyalty to the new administration, as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who usually sided with Gates and Petraeus as they pushed for an Iraq-style “surge” in Afghanistan.

In 2009, as Obama insisted on a steady withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq along the lines of an agreement that the Iraqi government had forced on Bush the new President wanted another withdrawal plan for Afghanistan, where Bush’s neglect had allowed the Taliban to make a comeback.

But Gates and Petraeus were set on guiding the inexperienced Obama into an Afghan “surge,” essentially by employing the old bureaucratic trick of presenting their desired outcome as the only realistic option. Mouse-trapped by this maneuver and realizing the political damage that he would face if he spurned the recommendations of Gates-Petraeus-Clinton Obama accepted a counterinsurgency “surge” of 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan but he pushed back by trying to limit the mission and insisting on withdrawal by the end of 2014.

Gates continued to undercut the President by briefing reporters during a flight to Afghanistan that “we are in this thing to win” and presenting the war as essentially open-ended. Gates offered these credulous reporters a history lesson on Afghanistan that Gates knew to be false. He declared “that we are not going to repeat the situation in 1989â€³ when the United States supposedly abandoned Afghanistan once the Soviet troops left.

Even Gates’s much-ballyhooed Pentagon budget trimming while winning rave reviews from the news media was more P.R. than reality. As noted by military affairs expert Lawrence J. Korb, Gates’s high-profile savings were mostly weapons projects, like the F-22, that were already slated for the scrap heap. Plus, Gates rejected any substantial cuts in future military spending despite having personally overseen a rise in the baseline Pentagon budget from $450 billion in 2006 to $550 billion when he departed in 2011.

Gates’s petty vindictiveness, which had wielded against his CIA colleagues, also was apparent in his final days as Defense Secretary in 2011 when he blocked the appointment of Marine Gen. James Cartwright as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of anger over Cartwright’s willingness to give President Obama’s alternative options to the Afghan “surge” in 2009.

The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock reported that Cartwright’s expected elevation from JCS deputy chairman to JCS chairman was nixed, in part, by Gates who “had long mistrusted Cartwright because of his independent relationship with the president and for opposing [Gates’s] plan to expand the war in Afghanistan.”

Slamming Obama

Gates’s nasty side resurfaces in his new memoir, Duty, according to press accounts before its release on Jan. 14. Gates reportedly lashes out at Vice President Joe Biden and other Obama administration officials who dared to express doubts about the wisdom of the counterinsurgency “surge” in Afghanistan.

Even more damaging, Gates offers a negative depiction of President Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton, portraying them as shallow political opportunists who supposedly had opposed the Iraq War “surge” only because of cheap politics. Gates further lambastes Obama for sending troops to fight and die in Afghanistan without believing in the mission.

According to Bob Woodward’s account of Duty, Gates concluded by early 2010 that Obama “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Woodward wrote that Gates was “leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat [by asserting] that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was ‘skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail.’”

Obama must now deal with the fallout of Gates having been allowed a front-row seat on national security policy and predictably turning on Obama and other Democrats who didn’t favor the wars that Bush-43 had started and that Gates had helped prosecute. It was a predictable problem and indeed it had been predicted.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Post navigation

20 comments for “Robert Gates Double-Crosses Obama”

Ruth-Ann

January 8, 2014 at 4:54 pm

And what did Obama expect? He hadn’t been in the snake pit (Washington) long enough to know what was what plus he was listening to the whispers of too many Rasputins to be able to make decisions that would be right for the country. Why he thought that any republican was going to help him is beyond intelligent thought? Clinton made the same mistake when he employed republicans, and Obama didn’t learn from that so history repeats itself once again. It is my opinion that it wasn’t just naivety on his part, but a certain amount of arrogance. According to the article, it doesn’t look like Gates has ever worked for the good of the country, but the ‘good’ of the republican party. It seems to me that some of his actions border on treason!

incontinent reader

January 8, 2014 at 5:04 pm

Bob- Great article. I hope you post this it (or give permission to someone to post it) on the Amazon.com and other online bookseller websites where readers can comment. I also hope no one who is curious buys the book, but instead will wait to check it out of the library so that Gates is not rewarded with healthy sales.

dbtexas

January 8, 2014 at 6:17 pm

Great writing, as usual. My first thoughts when I heard of this pending book, was that of another war hawk flapping his wings (and mouth). When Obama retained Gates, it seemed an opportunity bridge gaps between two dissimilar administrations. Unfortunately, this serves as another example of Obama’s greatest flaw – believing that the opposition will ever be willing to talk and compromise. Very disappointing, especially since the right wing will spend the next several months caterwauling over this. Thanks for your ever insightful analysis.

F. G. Sanford

January 8, 2014 at 6:36 pm

Obviously, Gates should have called his new book “Doody”, but that’s beside the point. As far as taking the rap for a strategy into which he was ‘mousetrapped”, it’s still not too late to resort to the Harry Truman solution: fire somebody. That arrogant bastard MacArthur has quite a few counterparts in today’s game. Pick one, any one, and fire the bastard. That’s the only leadership option at this point. Which brings us to the real question that by now, everybody should be asking: “Who’s in charge”?

With all due respect to Hersh’s claims, which aren’t at all original to Seymour Hersh, if you’re going to cite the Washington Times as a source, it’s hard to take the information seriously, and then within that Washington Times piece there’s a link to something pointing out that a Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist doesn’t believe the New York article on the raid, big surprise there, not.

It would be much better to source the claims in Hersh’s own words, not some Mooney-Murdoch inspired summary of claims by the liberal Hersh which contradict the Obama administration story.

So either Hersh made these claims, and they can be cited clearly, or drop it.

bobzz

January 8, 2014 at 10:19 pm

Obama did the same thing with financial appointees. Early on, he took advice from men like Joseph Stiglitz. When he became president, he appointed Robert Rubin acolytes like Geitnerâ€”the very ones that caused the financial meltdown.

Chris Jonsson

January 8, 2014 at 11:22 pm

This information is exactly what I had planned to hunt down myself when I got a chance. Robert Gates was a huge mistake for Defense Secretary. Of course he was a loyal â€œBushieâ€. Gates had been in the game a long time and had been involved in some previously suspicious government operations. He was not to be trusted. Now Iâ€™ll read this with interest. Thank you Robert Parry for your dogged research and long, well documented research!

Rehmat

January 8, 2014 at 10:53 pm

Robert Gates is not wrong in discrediting Obama administration and the law-makers. According to a recent poll conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 70% of Americans lack confidence in governmentâ€™s ability to make progress on important prblems facing the nation.

Robert Gates, a Republican conservative politician, has been a loyal friend of Israel. Even when, rarely, he criticized Israeli policy â€“ it was for his concern for the security of the Zionist entity. For example, on May 24, 2011 â€“ Robert M. Gates, in his speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), told his Jewish audience that America must keep its forces in Iraq to defend the region against Iran. Earlier he told the guys at the West Point that US cannot defeat Iran without using nuclear bomb.

To show his love for Israel, Gates did praise Barack Obamaâ€™s decision to order Navy SEALS to raid a house in Islamabad believed to be the hidding place of Osama Bin Laden â€œone of most courageous decision I have ever witnessed in the White Houseâ€œ. In September 2013, Pulitzer Prize winner Jewish investigative journalist and author, Seymour Hersh, in an interview with British daily Guardian said that Barack Obama lied about the death of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011 in Islamabad. He said Obamaâ€™s claim was â€œone big lieâ€ and that â€œnot one wordâ€ of the Obama administrationâ€™s narrative on what happened is true.

I remember not long after tearing up with Oprah in Grant Park to smiling my ass off watching our new First Couple dance at the Inauguration until all of a sudden hearing about the new Cabinet picks, and saying, ” Oh No!” “Who, WTF!”

I was watching Doris Kern Goodwin on all the Sunday Talk Shows promoting her stupid book, ” Team of Rivals” and comparing Obama’s new cabinet picks to Lincoln all the while knowing how something was going so terribly wrong!

Did they throw Barrack into a room, and make him watch the “Zapruder Film” over and over, and over again? Between one new cabinet pick from another I was wondering where all the ‘Hope and change’ was going. What happen to the Barrack Obama we waited for? In a strange way Gates made sense. Why?

Now here we are, and there’s Gates with his book. I actually like Biden better knowing Gates has a bad opinion of our beloved VP. I hope in a strange way this Gates book event makes President Obama become more the Obama we all wished for. Watching Secretary Kerry lately gives me hope.

In ant case I hope the new generation of Americans may right my generations wrongs. Be cool!

Jay

January 9, 2014 at 10:27 am

“Hope and Change” went out the door when Obama (senator) arranged the FISA Telecom immunity bill.

Right and McCain-Palin would have been much much worse, so I sure was glad when Obama was elected. And then given the Romney-Ryan option in 2012, of course the highly problematic Obama was still the much better choice.

Chris Jonsson

January 9, 2014 at 3:19 pm

Joe Tedesky,
You express my sentiments exactly. I think that there must have been an agreement between Bill Clinton and Obama to hire Clinton’s former staff members for key jobs in exchange for Bill hitting the campaign trail for Obama. That was a bad trade.
However, Obama knew several of them from college and his teaching post at U. of Chicago. He deferred to them much too often. One appointment that is impossible to explain is Arne Duncan. WTF?

Yet I see Obama being a CIA puppet, conceived (Thanksgiving, 1960, Havana), born a cast-off and bred in custody, cradle to grave as a lifelong human medical-behavior experiment, inducting a ‘psych-borg’ or, in original CIA terms a ‘manchurian candidate’ (which sounds silly now but it was classified so clever in the 1950s … and today, y’know, “you gotta fight the war for autocracy with the older model psych-borgs that you got” ~ Rumsfeld; while “the new models all look like Snowden: insubordinate” ~ Humankind).

My view is almost entirely a copy of Wayne Madsen’s view — I second it — and the explanatory exposition of Obama being a CIA creation and controlled asset all along, plain-and-simple, every step of the paved way, explains all his odd promise-betraying actions by one and the same explanation every time.

Think of Obama as a politician drone on a joystick. And look in an undisclosed bunker location for the guy holding that joystick POTUScontroller, in order to find and truly answer ‘Why?’ Obama did or does this or that. (Seeing an invisible joystick guy hypothetically can be applied and tested for prediction. In any special situation, foresee WWADD, What Would Allen Dulles Do, or better yet, as alive but vegetative, WWGHWBD. Then check the prediction with what really comes to pass.)

Madsen’s book excerpt: bit.ly/bam4zf,The Manufacturing of the President.

Whether or not it’s true the CIA built that ‘Obama’ model and owns him, the brevity of the idea prevents hours of mental agonizing to figure out WTF what’s he thinking what’s the meaning what he’s doing. For me, my mind is settled concerning “Whatever happened to the hope and change?” Case closed.
–

Dam Spahn

January 9, 2014 at 12:44 am

Gates demonstrates why Republicans don’t make good Klingons: they have no honor. Only a rookie or a fool would trust one.

Jay

January 9, 2014 at 12:59 am

Is the book out? I thought only the NYTimes has a review copy so far, and that idiot Bob Woodward has shot is mouth off about, not apparently accurately.

My point is that yes Gates is indeed guilty of these sins, but I don’t think that Robert Parry has a copy of this book yet, so would sound stronger having read the Gates book.

Anthony McCarthy

January 9, 2014 at 8:38 am

Considering his determinedly constructed facade of being the coolest guy in the universe, it’s astonishing what a sucker for the establishment Obama really is. He is the most conventional, most conservative (for his time) Democratic president since the 19th century. I blame a lot of that on his ivy league – prep school background which produces that kind of thing. The great irony in Democratic politics of the past century is that it was the conservative Texan of modest origins, Lyndon Johnson, who stood the chance of being the greatest liberal of all of them, if he hadn’t gotten suckered into expanding Vietnam by the Harvard boys.

No more Democratic nominees from the ivys and their equivalent, those places are training grounds for the ruling class rulers and those who aspire to be members of the ruling class. Democrats should only be real believers in democracy and those rarely come from the ivy leaguers.

Joe Tedesky

January 9, 2014 at 12:01 pm

I agree. Do you go to work to work, or make it work. Michael Hastings reported the way McCrystal spoke down of the President & VP. There were stories of Summers being a wise guy. Unless your Cheney or LBJ it seems it’s hard getting people to follow you…maybe candidates ought to pledge to ‘TRY’ or say ‘I’ll see what I can do’.

It’s all to BIG!

Anonymous

January 10, 2014 at 3:33 pm

I was absolutely stunned when Obama brought Gates into his administration. It’s no surprise the guy is a back-stabber.